KHOWAR ENGLISH DICTIONARY AND WORD LIST

by Mohammad Ismail Sloan

Khowar is an Indo-European language spoken by approximately 250,000 native speakers in Chitral, which is in the far North West corner of Pakistan.

Khowar has 42 phonemes, including 5 vowels. Several of the phonemes are not found in any other language of the region. The letters /t/, /th/, /d/, /l/, /sh/, /ch/, /chh/, and /j/ all have two different forms, one retroflexed and the other dential-veolar non-retroflexed. Every Chitrali who learned the language on his mother's knee can readily distinguish these forms, whereas others can never learn them, regardless of how long they have lived in Chitral. There are four different kinds of CH sounds, plus a similar TS sound and two different SH sounds.

Among these, the most interesting are the /chh/ aspirated and /ch/ non-aspirated sounds, of which the word Chitral itself is an example. This word is never pronounced correctly by outsiders. The word "chuchi" meaning "tomorrow morning" has two completely different 'ch' sounds. The first is aspirated palato-alveolar and the second is unaspirated palato-alveolar. "Chuy" meaning "night" is palato-alveolar whereas "chuy" meaning "hungry" is retroflex. "Char" meaning "a cliff" is unaspirated palato-alveolar whereas "char" meaning "a dry leaf" is unaspirated retroflex.

Because there are 42 phonemes, it would be difficult to write Khowar in the Roman alphabet, which has only 26 letters. The Roman alphabet is still more suitable that the Urdu alphabet, but, nevertheless, for religious reasons, most efforts have been made to write Khowar in the Urdu alphabet, by adding dots to the bottoms of several Urdu letters. These efforts have not met with much success, however, and Khowar remains primarily an unwritten language. No major book has been translated into Khowar.

Due to the winding nature of the valleys in Chitral, there is no word for "north" or "south" in Khowar. There is also no distinction between "he" and "she" in Khowar.

Here is a short sample list of more than 500 Khowar words, which gives examples of the difficult phonemes.